Get ready for the hardest thing you’ll ever read. Worse than Shakespeare! Harder than a stereo manual! Even more difficult than trying to file your taxes! It’s John Milton and Paradise Lost!

We listened to the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil before we began today, and I even dressed up for the lesson today.

I gave you all MY notes for this, so it should be saved as a OneNote file on your desktop. If you weren’t here, or I couldn’t send it to you (Elizabeth and Kawika!), I’ll give it to you tomorrow. No point in making you do extra work!

Big ideas to remember: free will, pride, invocation, topic statement, epic, Adam and Eve, inversion, run on sentences, and sects.

If God is all powerful and all good, how is it that evil exists?

This is the essential question that John Milton is trying to answer with this poem, and for him, it goes back to Adam and Eve making a poor decision. So then he had to explain WHY Adam and Eve made that bad decision, which is why he spends so much time writing about Satan.

Make sure if you weren’t here and this confuses you, try this summary from Shmoop.